Category: Albert Goldbarth

Sleep. Sleep! I feel like I’ve just discovered it, and it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. The universe, even.

The Sciences Sing a LullabyeAlbert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,Psychology says: but first it has to be night, soBiology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
andHistory says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

Remembering a room. Your bed. Teaching me words in your father’s language: gateau, vēlo, grimpette. You wanted to me to say, Qu’est-ce que tu es beau!, and in reward, a kiss. I look at you and say, Peut-être. I remember it was a long afternoon.

Yours,
T.

The WayAlbert Goldbarth

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.